We were discussing in chat earlier and it seemed like it could result in some decent stories. So, tell us about your first computer!

I got my first PC for my 8th grade graduation, in 1993. It was a Compaq 386 that my mom had built (apparently, back then Compaq had licensed builders, and this one also served the state agency at which she worked). Of course, they didn't build it to spec, and forgot to install Windows 3.11 on it. I was not savvy enough yet to realize it, so I spent a week or so learning MS-DOS 5.2 before I realized in trawling the filesystem that Windows was nonexistent. Then it took them a month to track down a license for it, by which time I was pretty decent with DOS.

What did I do with it? The usual. Played a lot of games that I got bootlegged from family and friends - a lot of old DOS versions on 5.25" floppies of things like Family Feud and Wheel of Fortune, as well as some games that came on ultramodern 3.5" discs Jack Nicklaus Golf (with a pretty killer course editor), Commander Keen, and Wolfenstein.

I also got a pretty hilarious hand-me-down 286 "laptop" a little later from my dad's office. It weighed a good thirty pounds with the battery - which was shot, so it had to have the battery in place AND be plugged in to use it - and was capable really of only running Wordperfect.

It will be funny to me to see if there are any younger users who will report in with their fancy first machines that had graphics capable of more than 256 colors.

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"To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap." - Kevin Kelly

Our first family computer was a Mac Plus. It had an external tower hard drive that was 30 MB and my dad always said the hard drive alone cost $500. I only vaguely remember it - I more remember our Mac IISi since it was more during my formative years, and also because it is still sitting in the closet in my old room at my mom's house. I still want to bring it back and see if I can get it working again just for funsies.

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Hey, put the cellphone down for a whileIn the night there is something wildCan you hear it breathing?And hey, put the laptop down for a whileIn the night there is something wildI feel it, it's leaving me

My memory is hazy on the exact model but I do believe it is the same one Neal linked there, the Mac Plus. It was really just a hand-me-down from my dad, who must at all times (to this day) have the best Macintosh computer available. I had that thing sitting at my desk for much of the early 90's after my dad bought new computers, and still remember playing these games on it:

T'was some Compaq (from Best Buy, if I remember correctly) from 2000. At this point, all I remember is that it came with some version of Windows '98, and had a ridiculous 56 megs of RAM. In hindsight, it wasn't very good, especially for the money that was spent on it, but I have some fond memories of discovering some of my favorite games on it, like HoMM3, Diablo 2, and the Baldur's Gate Series.

I remember that our first family computer cost a ridiculous amount of money, something over $1000. This was back in 1997 so of course it was running Win95. Some of my best memories on that thing were being on AOL, going to CoN, and earthbound.net . To this day I can't get over the crazy small HD we had (a whopping 1.59 gb).

Its CGA board/monitor had an additional mode running at 640x200 with 16 colours. That was pretty crazy for CGA, which normally ran at 320x200 with four colours, or 640x200 mono. So it had quite a nice paint program that came with stock pictures like this:

(I "GEM painted" the scary toothy lady out of our local copy.)

My dad ordered a bunch of 5.25" disks with miscellaneous freeware and shareware on them, so we tried out all sorts of weird things, as well as some of the well known classics. But you're probably more familiar with the VGA, sound card enabled form of those classics than what I used to see.

See, you couldn't just have any four colours; it had to be one of the four palettes on the right here.

Along with Keen and Prince of Persia, some of the more underdog classics:

PopcornA French Arkanoid clone with character. The game designer went on to make Alone in the Dark. Used weird science to show both red and cyan in the CGA palette, which didn't work when emulated on EGA/VGA cards, so is incorrectly remembered as having the magenta palette by most. Now available as a modern thing (although the Play Store version disappeared some time ago).

DiggerDig things, get score and don't die.

The monsters can only follow the initial paths on the map and any more you dig by moving around. Gravity is a fickle mistress: neither you nor the monsters are affected by it during normal movement, but you can dig underneath the money bags to drop them on a monster and kill it. You need to drop them a decent height to break them open and collect the gold anyway.

You can fire at things with F1, which we didn't know because who maps a fire button to F1? This completely changed the game when we found out years later. But you have a very, very limited rate of fire, so it's only really useful in an emergency, especially since monsters respawn at the edges. This too has been remastered, but it was remastered 15 years after it came out, and it's now 19 years since the remaster, so. There's an Android version though.

SopwithIn theory, you fly around and bomb bases and shoot enemy planes down. In practice, nobody knows how to take off, so they crash into the cow and die in a blaze of heroic PC speaker music. There's new stuff for this too but no phone app that's available any more.

Fire KingSuper fun action RPG. There was a huge continent to explore with lots of flavoursome text narration scattered about to craft a story. I got stuck and didn't finish it until years later.

Faery Tale AdventureCan't find any CGA screenshots of this, so your eyes get a break. Just map that onto the palette from Digger in your head. Also an action RPG with a big world. Probably technically an early open world game, since there's a massive area and no screen swapping (except entering interiors); in that respect it was cleverer, and it did the high fantasy setting and free exploration better - you could eventually find a turtle to carry you across water, and a swan to fly anywhere on - but it just wasn't quite as fun or witty as Fire King, and could be a bit cumbersome to play at times. A fairly unique conceit was that if you died, you respawned as your younger brother, and had to find your corpse if you wanted your stuff back (which you probably needed). There were three brothers, and if they all died, that was it. They had different stats too.

Double BlocksAs you can see, this is a completely original concept for a game. Responsible for starting my mum's Tetris addiction. Well put together with a nice local multiplayer option. Plenty of colours because it was all in text mode.

Well, the first computer I had access too was the Apple II...I wanna say 'c'? Lemme google this...

Yeah, that looks about right.

Anyway, this...well, it had games, sure, but by this point, I had access to a Super Nintendo and even my school had just gotten those new 'Mac' things that had mice and I lived in the boonies, so anything I could even put on it would have to be something someone from the household would somehow obtain. We kept this sucker well past its prime, which ended up with me getting real familiar with DOS commands. We didn't get another new computer until post Win95.

An Acer.

This was my first 'personal' computer as eventually, I got it as a hand me down. It could just barely run 3d games and again, we still lived out in the boonies, so I was only able to get my hand on a precious few amount of games, and none of them were clean installs. We didn't have no 'driver updates' in my day! Oh no, you had to get your ass right in the bios and fiffle with DMAs and IRQs and make sure all the sound channels were set up proper. We had to work to get our games to work son! ROOTS! This was when I got a hold of Jane's USNF and got reeeeeeally into Flight Sims.

The next one after that was the first one I built myself...sort of? I was going to a tech college for computer animation and needed my own render farm, so I went to an online site that would build custom setups and got a pretty beefy machine for less than 1k. It had 1.5 GB just of ram, which back in '02 was a silly amount. It could play more advanced games, but since it was designed with rendering in mind, it actually didn't play them very well. After I left college, I found it cheaper to just order the computer parts and build the rigs myself.

Since then, I've ended up in a situation where I'll make multiple computers. My 'work' computer, which I use for art 'n animation and my 'game' computer where I run my games and dick 'bout on the internet.

Dunno the exact brand, but it was an old-timey Macintosh, probably early 90s. It had stuff like FreeCell (IIRC) and took those huge-ass floppy disks with a circle in the middle. Don't remember much about the games, other than having cool stuff like Oregon Trail and some edutainment jank. Pretty sure it died on me awhile after, making me lose notes I'd been taking on Flying Dragon (N64) items, haha.

I feel like a senior citizen reading this thread, because my first computer was a Texas Instruments 99-4A. It didn't have a disk drive; it had a tape deck. A regular, audio cassette tape deck. Programs would take forever to load. Games? Sure, there were some, but I remember typing in the code for them.

Our second computer was the IBM PCjr, which was much better. It had a disk drive! And a whopping 256KB of RAM! (My parents got into arguments over buying the additional ram, but Dad won). It also had a cartridge drive;some games were released on cartridge, and we also had Cartridge BASIC. I again typed code into the computer to play games. I have very fond memories of its music simulator, actually: you could play up to four voices at once. So I spent days transcribing piano songs for the computer to play. One such song was "Under the Sea" from The Little Mermaid. I honestly wish I still had access to that, as I worked really hard at it.

We also played some great games on it such as King's Quest, and the Infocom text adventure games (Wishbringer & Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). I really spent a lot of time playing with the computer. Probably is no surprise then that I grew up to double-major in math and computer science.

My first computer was a something86 that ran Windows 3.1. My dad upgraded it to run Windows 3.11 at some point. Then later he upgraded it again to run Windows 95 and to have a Turtle Beach brand CD-ROM drive, but it ran really slowly.

Played a variety of DOS games on it -- Duke Nukem (the original trilogy), Cosmo, Secret Agent, Commander Keen's various episodes, Tank Wars, Reader Rabbit, Math Rabbit, Dark Ages, some DOS dogfight game, and such.

Later games included The Castle of Dr. Brain, The Island of Dr. Brain, Sierra's Hoyle Book of Games, and attempting but failing to run EcoQuest: the Search for Cetus. I also tried playing King's Quest VI but was thoroughly confused.

We had (and still have, actually) this Gravis joystick, but never had the right plug to plug it in, so it went unused all these years.

And the keyboard was clangy like those old keyboards. Ahh...

But anyway, that's the computer I learned to play games on. Specifically I learned to arrow keys + Ctrl (usually jump) and Alt (usually shoot). This is why I play games using arrow keys + ZXCVASDF these days.

I also had my first experiences with PKZip and PKUnzip here. Well, with compressed files in general. And learning how to install stuff.

Also our Win95 was such that we actually got to see the "It's safe to turn off your computer now." orange text on black background.

I don't remember the make or model, but it was a PC of some sort back in the mid-90s. I occasionally went online through Prodigy, but mostly I played computer games like Prince of Persia, Commander Keen, Off Road (I think that's what it was called), and Bubble Bobble.

It was an 8088 processor, had a Hercules Monochrome monitor and it ran a version of DOS and you had to park the hard drive before shutting down. Due to it having said monitor, it wasn't much for video games and my old sure didn't care.

I did have some ASCII games and some of the really basic Sierra games and some text adventures. I was always fascinated going to someone's house who owned a color monitor, esp the 256 deal.

I don't remember the exact model, but it was an HP running Windows 98, Since my family was the one that would always receive the computer some relative is finished or had a problem with, we went through a lot over the years.

That is actually really close to what I described in my first post, Gabe. I don't think my case had all the buttons on the top of the case like that, I think mine were below the 3.5" drive. Mine also predated the Intel Inside slogan so I'm guessing yours was a model from a couple years later. I definitely had that monitor though!

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"To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap." - Kevin Kelly

My dad bought a Gateway 2000 back in 1998. It was early in the year so it ran Windows 95 instead of Windows 98. Boy was it slow, but we didn't know anything else. I can still remember the noise it would make when trying to load something on the internet. It came with a few free games: Myst, G-Police, the Microsoft Games Pack (played Jewel Thief a bunch with my sister) and Microsoft Encarta, which had the Mind Maze game that I was very fond of.

I played the ever living hell out of G-Police to the point that my dad bought me a flight stick for it. I never beat it, though. It was a pretty tough game. Eventually my uncle, who is a retired Air Force pilot, bought me a copy of Flight Simulator. Later on, I got a copy of Rogue Squadron 3D, and from then on my love for flight games was permanent.

My grandmother owned a computer three years prior and we learned how to use the internet at her home. I would get all three of my parents AOL ACCOUNTS banned when you could do anything to get banned.

I loved that computer but any problem that occurred with that computer was my fault and my parents don’t understand computers. My father was always downloading porn which caused the computer to be infected early on.

The first machine that was actually MINE was a PC handed down to me from the college I was attending at the time. It was an ancient machine, pumping out 800mhz of power and not able to take more than 256mb of SDRAM.I used to play Unreal Tournament with a bunch of jackas- uhhh, i mean nice people back in the day, and the machine was so terrible, I would actually be aided by the lag.(anyone who would tell you my skin was also an aid is lying, don't listen)